Spring Spawns New Research

Hey, there was a crocus in bloom in our garden when I got home yesterday. There is probably about a litre of snow left in that part of the lawn. Of course there is still a good 2m of snow along my side yard, so it's still going to take a while.

But that's fine - we usually get a nice solid rain that brings it down. I'm eager for our pond to be re-exposed so that I can move the fish out of the basement and into nature again, where they can feed on mosquito larvae and other things that crawl around the pond. I probably under-fed them last year - ie almost not at all. It was probably fine in the spring, but by summer, I suspect there were fewer larvae etc. to eat. But they did pretty well - it's a decent ecosystem with a stream and a small collecting pond and plants and all sorts of stuff. They really liked chewing on the plant roots it seems as well. Of course, their young didn't stand much of a chance.

One of the fish - Sidney Koiman - cost me about $10, though the others were all around 20 cents. I'm hoping he puts on some poundage and can add some interest to the pond. There are two light coloured ones, three orange ones and two dark ones. One of the dark ones is larger even than Sidney. I'll keep a running tab on the blog here perhaps with the fish-count over the spring and summer.

My other bit of research planned, now that the snow is retreating from the record snowfall year, is to do some snail tracking. I'm going to wrangle me up some snails, and paint numbers on their backs, then release them recording their release locations and see where they end up when I do some searching later on. Hmmmm, I wonder what the lifespan of a snail is anyway.

On to real research in, er, Oceanography. I have a pile of lofty research ideas in front of me, and I have to go through them and rank them. I think my criteria will be something like creativity/innovation (or maybe those two should be separate), relevance to our, uh, oceanography industry/biz, and what else. I guess loftiness - reachiness. Something like that. There are some real jokes in there, as well as some that are just ordinary projects. Not sure how many are worth of the goals of the exercise. I'm sure I'll blog more on this process later.